Ally (17 page)

Poor sod: he missed all this. A life he'd shared with the colonists for generations had ended abruptly and brutally. But then it had ended that way for Josh Garrod, too, and Shan suddenly missed him even though she hardly knew him. What a stupid, senseless waste: what a fucking inexplicable thing for a level-headed farmer to do, to decide that a microscopic organism was the work of the devil and so it was okay to help some spook nuke an island to drive out the demon. Medieval, irrational, superstitious.

That was why motive still mattered. Sometimes it was an early warning system for lunacy.

And I frag an infected bezeri, and what does that make me?
Shan sought the line between what she might do and what Lindsay had done, and couldn't find anything other than the range of collateral damage. It was one of those fragile moments when she had a real insight into the impossible nature of ethical logic, and that it was an Escher staircase that apparently led somewhere but couldn't exist.

“Where are Lindsay and Dr. Rayat now?” Deborah asked. Shan flinched: it was an inevitable question but the timing felt like telepathy. “We do still pray for them.”

“Lin has…changed a lot. And living with the bezeri, we assume. Rayat turned himself in. Wasn't cut out for being a valued member of squid society.”

“What are you going to do about him?”

Shan wished she knew. He should have been fragmented into hamburger by now. She'd never had problems about killing in the past, not like normal coppers, and she was sure she didn't have any now, not when she could still taste the pulsing rage rising in her throat when she'd set about kicking the shit out of Rayat on a cell floor. She'd have killed him
then, all right,
shit
yes. Something had diverted her. Something had dulled both her motive and her anger.

It was always about justice.

“He says he now believes
c'naatat
has to be kept out of human hands,” she said. “But as he's a pathological frigging liar, who knows? Esganikan's left him with Shapakti to play with. I hope he shoves a few probes up his arse while I'm away.”

Deborah looked down at her feet for a second, and Shan remembered she'd never sworn in front of the Garrods. “Apart from your views on deception, you're more alike than you think.”

Perhaps I'm hoping Shapakti really
will
do some useful research on removing
c'naatat.

“He's certainly persistent,” said Shan.

“He believes he's serving his state.”

So he ended up nearly exterminating a genocidal race. If I was Deborah, I'd see a bit of divine intervention there, too.

“Everyone in a war does,” said Shan. “Still doesn't mean there aren't two sides of the story.”

If Deborah said
forgiveness
next, Shan resolved to swing for her, even if the woman was half her weight and a lot shorter. That was fine for
her.
She could tell herself any lies she wanted about days of reckoning and turning cheeks and all that shit, but Shan looked at the here and now, and at Aras. At that moment, he erased everything around her: he held his head tilted slightly on one side in that wess'har gesture of curiosity, dark braid coiled into his collar, so alien and lonely and guileless that she wanted to forget the bloody colonists and the Umeh crew and,
yes,
even the gene bank, and protect him—ferociously, totally, without reservation. It was a powerful and ambushing emotion. It was as strong as anger. Nothing had ever trumped her rage before.

I forgot you. I forgot who you were. I forgot you were the last thought I had as I died.

But she wasn't dead, and Aras had his own anguish. She walked the few meters to the crop tunnel and slipped her arm through his, pulling him away as discreetly as she could. He looked puzzled, head tilting further, but followed her.

“'Bye, Deborah,” Shan said. “I'll be in touch, but expect the evacuees any time.”

“Can I ask for a favor?” That was unusual for Deborah. “Is there any chance of an ITX link? I'd like to make contact with the churches back home.”

Normally Shan would have automatically heard the ringing of unspecific alarms, but Esganikan was right: it made no difference now what humans said to Earth.

“Certainly.”
I'm going soft.
“Can't promise you'll get through the queue for the portal at the Earth end, but I'll get you the kit.”

“Giyadas would enjoy showing you how to use it,” said Aras. “The matriarch's child.”

Shan had promised her a visit to Mar'an'cas to see the
gethes
in their unnatural habitat. Good old Deborah: she'd keep the marines busy and amuse Giyadas. That was worth paying for with an ITX link.

Deborah left them to walk back through the camp on their own, as if confident that none of the colonists they might run into would embarrass her by being overtly hostile. There were no baleful stares this time, and few people out and about to deliver them. The sound of running feet behind her made Shan spin around and her hand was already reaching down the back of her belt for her 9mm when she checked herself on seeing someone she recognized.

“Shan!” A woman called Sabine Mesevy—Dr. Mesevy, botanist Mesevy, former payload Mesevy—came pounding up to her with a package in her hand. “Shan, wait.”

Shan dropped her arms to her side, wondering why
c'naatat
didn't override that reflex to draw a gun. “It's been a long time, Doctor.”

Mesevy, hair scraped back and pinned, rough brown working clothes showing signs of fraying, thrust the package in Shan's direction. She'd found God back on Bezer'ej, a more likely location for a Pauline revelation than Reading Metro.

“Here,” she said. “I never did it. I never thanked Ade for saving my life. This is for him. Pickles.”

“I'm sure he'll love that. Thanks.”

“I'll never forget him.”

But she'd done a pretty good job at the time. Ade had ignored his own fear—fear enough to make him shit himself and throw up—to haul her out of bog with a
sheven
on the hunt. Maybe time spent in quiet prayer made you realize why you were still breathing and who you owed your life to.

“It was quite a feat,” said Shan. It was the moment she found she wanted a modest, earnest, slightly awkward marine sergeant called Adrian Bennett, and was embarrassed by her own human weakness. “But those blokes free-fall from high orbit, so all in a day's work, eh?”

“Thank him for me.”

“Will do.”

Shan wasn't managing
gracious
today. She could do it with a following wind but these days the impatient, tactless wess'har component of her was ganging up with her own lack of diplomacy to vent her frustration about things she couldn't even name. She shoved the hemp-wrapped jar in her pocket and strode on towards the shore with Aras at her heels.

He went to push the skimmer back into the water, offering no comment as she took out the jar and examined the carefully tied bow of
efte
twine.

“I find Deborah's attitude to you totally—unnatural,” she said at last.

“Why?”

“Because if anyone harmed you, I'd kill them. That's all there is to it.” She stepped into the shallow draft vessel and settled down in the stern.
Don't upset the trim.
“Just imagine faith that strong.”

“Strong enough to take
you
twenty-five light-years from home without consciously knowing why?”

Aras could never quite manage a human smile, but when he was amused or pleased it was obvious. He beamed, for want of a better word, radiating satisfaction for a moment. Maybe it was the relaxation in his facial muscles and some infrasonics she'd ceased to notice consciously. The skimmer moved astern at his touch and then came about to head out of the rocky cover and into open water.

“I knew why I took a one-way ticket,” she said. “Suppressed Briefings are conscious, whatever people think. The drug stopped me recalling the information until I came across the right trigger, but it's not like having no intellectual proof of something.”

“Do you still resent Eugenie Perault for sending you on this mission under false pretenses?”

“They were only false for her, sweetheart. I found the gene bank and it's going
home.
Well, part is. I wouldn't sleep well if we didn't have a duplicate.”

Aras paused. “I miss Josh.”

He was suddenly back to his unsettled self of recent weeks. It hadn't been a good idea to bring him here; and that didn't bode well for a trip to Umeh. It was heartbreaking to hear him say it.

“Don't start beating yourself up,” said Shan. “Whatever we know now doesn't change the fact that he played an active role in detonating nuclear devices. There's no way I can color that innocent.”

“My pain is that I'd do the same again even though I also regret it. And you?”

“And me…what?”

“Would you step out the airlock again?”

It was the kind of grand gesture that beatified you and didn't require an encore. She was conscious of the grenade in her jacket pocket. But the fact that she
could
finish herself off properly gave her a whole new layer of moral dilemmas that almost no other human would ever experience.

Her job was to keep it that way. It always would be.

“It's easier to do that than to shove someone else out into space.” She edged up to the bow and stood to put her arm around his waist.
Sod the trim.
The skimmer rocked briefly: they couldn't drown, so it didn't matter. “And that tells me that I care more about you than solving the
c'naatat
problem once and for all.”

“The soil-dwelling
c'naatat
organisms survived the bombing, and now the bezeri are infected. Killing me and Ade would solve nothing.”

“I was actually saying that I love you two and I'd rather
take my own life than yours, uncharacteristically mushy as that might seem.”

“I realize you find it hard to express emotions.”

“I'm fine with anger and being pissed off.”

“It was an act of kindness to allow the colony an ITX link, too.”

She hadn't asked Nevyan. She ought to, she knew. “No reason to refuse. I'm buying goodwill.”

The colony's homebound transmissions were no different from Eddie's broadcasts, and she didn't vet those any more. She hadn't any idea of the full content that he filed to BBChan daily except that if it was controversial, he'd show her first.

Eddie had always understood the catalytic nature of reporting, that it shaped and changed as much as it stood back and observed. In some ways, he had a harder job than she did. Her purpose was usually effortlessly clear. In a world of gray areas, she had always been able to find black and white, until she came to the Cavanagh system.

“The colonists are harmless,” Aras said. “If all humans lived carefully because they were afraid of eternal damnation, then Earth would have no problems.”

“You must have some God-bothering genes in you, sweetheart.”

“God, real or not, drives many humans, so I take it into account.”

Shan wondered if God drove Helen Marchant, whose family link to devout Eugenie Perault she didn't know about until Eddie told her. Helen, whose arse she covered and whose terror operation she shielded because—copper or not—she thought it was moral.

And I still do.

Yes, maybe it was time she returned her message.

And thank you for Helen.

That bitch Perault hadn't slipped
that
into her Suppressed Briefing. Shan always had the feeling that there was still more data to be triggered and unleashed, an itch at the back of her mind that she couldn't scratch, but it was probably her wounded pride at being stiffed for once by a politician.

“Bastard,” she said, and meant pretty well everyone.

F'nar: Nevyan Tan Mestin's home

There was a fleet of new aliens in the system and nobody would ship Eddie Michallat out to see them.

He was furious. He wasn't sure why it aggravated him, because nobody else was going to get the story either: he was the only journalist in 150 trillion miles.

He went in search of Shan or anyone he could cajole into taking him to see the Skavu. The insistent inner voice that told him that News Desk would rip him a new one if he didn't get the story had suddenly emerged again, long after he'd been certain that he didn't give a shit. What were they going to do, fire him?

From this terrace level, he could see Ade and Qureshi heading towards the Exchange. They were prepping to evacuate Umeh Station: the Skavu would be deployed on Umeh. His journo logistics connected the dots and he set off after them. Where there were marines, there was the promise of transport.

“Ade!” he called. “Ade! Hang on, mate!”

F'nar's acoustics made his voice echo around the bowl of the caldera. For some reason it embarrassed him, even though the wess'har were as unselfconscious about noise as they were about venting their unedited thoughts or copulating. Ade and Qureshi stopped dead and turned to look at him.

Eddie took the narrow steps down the terraces a little faster than was sensible and stumbled, missing the next step and suddenly seeing a hundred-meter drop looming as he grabbed a pearl-coated post to stop his fall. His gut rolled. It was a bloody long way down, and wess'har didn't have balustrades on the walkways.

Qureshi cupped her hands in front of her mouth to shout back at him. “Take it one step at a time, Eddie…”

“Ha fucking ha.”

Ade looked unamused when Eddie caught up with them, his heart still hammering.

“You don't bounce like I do, Eddie. Remember that.”